How should co-founders split equity?

Early startups often have this dilemma – how should they split equity amongst the initial founders? All the founders quit their full-time jobs to work on the startup, everyone’s skills seem to complement one another, and it seems that everyone is putting in equal effort in making the startup work. An alternative would be to let the startup gain some traction, and observe individual founders’ contributions, then decide on the equity split. But this might be a potential dispute in the making as well. There’s also no investor / mentor to advise the team on this. So how should early stage founders split their initial pool of shares?

Many founders I talked to actually split their equity equally among themselves. But I personally don’t believe in the 50-50 idea, simply because there needs to be that one person that makes the decisions. I think it’s always a good idea to have one founder owning the majority stake. To give an example, for two founders, I prefer a 60-40 split, and for three founders, I would suggest 40-30-30 or 44-28-28. For four founders, it could be a 40-20-20-20 or 35-25-20-20. You get the drift. And investors do not like to find themselves dealing with multiple founders / stakeholders too. It’s too much of a hassle, and a huge administrative pain in the long run. Like this article mentioned,

“50-50 is not a business decision, it’s a compromise.”

I tried to sum up 10 questions that might be helpful in deciding how much equity each founder gets (this really helped me too). If there is one founder that scores a higher total score, this person should be the majority shareholder. Here goes:

1. Who is the CEO?
2. Who came up with the idea?
3. Who is working full-time on the project?
4. If this person leaves the team, will it severely impact the project?
5. Who is in charge of coding the project?
6. Who can bring in a team of awesome engineers?
7. Who is the growth hacker / brings in the business?
8. Who is in charge of finances / budgeting?
9. Who does the fund-raising / pitching to investors?
10. Who is more well-known in the industry?

Any questions that can be added to this list above? Are there better tips to resolve equity allocation?